Have Lots of Real Estate Leads? Don't Piss Them Off

So you've set up your real estate farm area and have been sending out farming postcards on a very consistent basis. You've set up your Facebook campaigns and your ad retargeting campaigns to target homeowners in your farm area and those that have visited your ads and pages. You've also been working your past client and sphere database, working to get more referral business. Congratulations! You are on your way.

With all those pieces in place, you're accumulating lots of leads that need follow up. How you follow up is critical, however. You need to be very careful. Cultivating leads is kind of like online dating. You have to make sure you are speaking to your leads' needs. If you do not do this and you end up sending them tons of unrelated content they deem unnecessary, they are going to get angry and they are simply going to "swipe left" and move onto the next agent.

What You Send Matters

What you send your real estate leads matters. In all your marketing efforts, you are going to get many different types of homeowners at different points in their lives with different and specific needs. Can you tailor your follow-up to 100 percent of each lead's needs? Of course not. There are some ways, though, that you can set up your lead nurturing campaigns so that it will span across the largest cross-section of needs, ensuring you don't turn your leads off.

With that in mind, today I'll cover three ways you can make sure you are nurturing your leads in a meaningful way (and NOT pissing them off) to ensure that you win the opportunity to meet with them in a listing presentation and then list their home.

Define Your Audiences

One of the very first things we do with agents when they come to us to help them with their marketing efforts is work on defining who their ideal clients are. We do this by developing client personas. Those personas dictate the types of messages that are deployed to homeowners in their marketplace, and those same personas can help you with defining how many audiences and how many lead nurturing campaigns you are going to need to set up to successfully convert these leads.

Looking at the types of personas you are marketing to, you can craft your messages. For instance, maybe one of your personas is empty nesters that are looking to downsize. The messages you would send them are drastically different than people that would fall in the persona of perhaps being a young couple with a growing family that needs to sell and find a larger home with a large yard. Obviously, you can see how sending messages meant for one group to the opposite group could be disastrous. The messages would make you seem out of touch, turn off the lead and cause them to simply move on to the next Realtor.

Once you've completed this exercise, you will likely find that you have quite a few campaigns. The average Realtor we manage marketing campaigns for has anywhere from two to six different personas they are targeting. I know it seems like extra work to make so many different follow-up campaigns, but if you find yourself with many personas, take the time to establish this up front. It will pay you back infinitely in the long run.

Define Your Differentiating Factors

One of the most common questions a potential seller or buyer will surely want an answer to is "Why you?" What is it about you that is so special? How are you different than the other 50 to 100 Realtors in your marketplace that would also love the opportunity to sell this prospect's listing or help this prospect buy a new home? You need to be able to give specific examples of what makes you different and valuable.

The catch to detailing these differentiating factors as you cultivate your leads is not making it sound too sales-ey. If it sounds like a pitch, you are going to turn off your prospects, and they will look for another Realtor to represent them. However, if you approach this task with the idea of educating your prospect, rather than preaching or selling to them, you will win. It's all in the delivery. If you have a marketing agency you work with, they can certainly help you craft your story. If you do not, I might suggest coming up with alternate versions of your messages and doing A/B split testing to see which versions of your messages are best received.

Make Them See What's In It for Them

The last, and perhaps most important piece of the puzzle, is catering to your prospects. By nature, we human beings are all a bit selfish. If your marketing pieces spend all of the message describing all your differentiating factors without circling back around to the homeowner, your message will fall short and simply seem like you are bragging. Instead of falling into this trap, your message needs to not only point out your differentiating factors, establishing you as the thought leader in your marketplace, BUT also draw a direct line for the homeowner that explains how those differentiating factors are going to benefit them.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.